carsten

First of all: I am really longing for a good and reasonable priced DAM and as a user of AP, I hope the coming app will be as good. Before I give my 2c to former thoughts and requests, I would like to focus on another topic: multi-user capability. I understand that most of you are professionals or semi-professionals and might work alone, but look around: digital pictures are ubiquitous and in private live (that's the vast majority compared to "photo-enthusiastics") polaroid has been gone. The one "family computer" has waved goodbye and now there are two, three...well maybe one computer per member - not to mention tablets and smartphones. Now people begin to realize, that it makes sense to store their assets (pictures, videos, movies, music, documents, etc.) on a central location with enough GBs or TBs to hold them, a RAID level to guard them (oh, imagine all my pictures were on a single drive with no backup! - Well I have three backups;-), and not tied to a specific computer or OS, so they can exchange the old computer for a shiny new one and all DAM will still be there. At the same time they expect to thumb through their DAM (well part of it) on all devices, at all locations - any time. They need a chance to sync with the central location! My family is doing digital pictures only since 2001. While we are far away from being semi-professionals, we "pimp" our pictures - at least some of them - from time to time for print-outs or because we took them for someone who is expecting to get a decent looking picture from us. We tag them and augment their meta-data. And we split work in the family and we like to see changes (including those another member has done) reflected on our screens. We need a chance to sync with a central store. We need a central store that is multi-user robust and syncable to our devices - at least to our computers! And this is one thing most other (not considering enterprise products, which costs a little fortune) are lacking. LR is not good at it (in fact it is one-ever-again-upcoming feature request), Pixave can't do it, Aperture was not good at it, Photos - forget Photos, iMatch: no (loved it though during my "Windows time"), digiKam - no. IDimager might have the potential, but they don't offer a family license and not making my living out of photos I can not find any reason to pay almost $ 1000 ($189 per user for 5 family members). For private, for hobby - not for commercial use: 5 users = $ 120 might work. You see, I've been through some DAM-tools over the years. Yeah, one could say syncing can be done by exporting, copying...well whatever. Yes, but a lot of picture corrections could be done with software from the 90s or early 2000s - but no one would consider it. It's clumsy, it's slow....it's old. That's not what the future will be. But the technical details how to do it (may with a server, maybe with a dumb NAS, I doubt a cloud solution would do it for the sheer amount of data and "slow" lines) should be left to the clever wizards of code at Affinity. So, with respect to this topic, I am not hoping for a LR competitor. I am hoping for a superior product. Supported OS: having already switched from Windows to OS X and now seeing the advantages of a Surface pro in certain areas for certain work profiles - I have never been nor will be an OS evangelist. At work I am responsible for a Windows Server infrastructure, doing with my MacBook. At home we are all-Apple, for it has been much easier to support my family than it was during the Windows age. But if I ever switch again, I really would love to see my favorite DAM running on the other OS :-)) In the end, it should be an economic decision of Affinity, because their company wealth will bring us (hopefully) updates and improvements for a long time. Features of a DAM / Image editing capabilities: given my non-professional background, I really would appreciate simple picture corrections. But IMHO, if you go and ask five people wether a DAM should offer image editing and what features it should have, you'll get 5 different answers ;-) And for me: I still have AP to do whatever I want.